


Different

by misseffect



Category: Mass Effect - All Media Types, Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: 2 4 6 8 why is garrus vakarian great, Developing Relationship, F/M, Fictober, Fictober 2018, Interspecies Relationship(s), Mass Effect 1, Mass Effect 2, One Shot, POV Garrus Vakarian, Shakarian - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-23
Updated: 2018-10-23
Packaged: 2019-08-06 14:52:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 978
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16389779
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misseffect/pseuds/misseffect
Summary: ME2 Shakarian for the Fictober2018 prompt 'this is not new, it only feels like it.'





	Different

Garrus was starting to feel like he'd met her for the first time, twice.

His own name had never sounded as good as it did that second time, tumbling out of her from across what he thought would be the last room he’d ever see. When the walls melted into blood and smoke, he found himself grasping for the rapid-fire crack of her Vindicator like the hilt of a knife in the dark. That sound stayed with him for a week in the medbay, popping in his half-ruined auditory tract, and he didn’t mind a bit.

He had to remind himself afterwards that it had _always_ been like this. Back to the first bullet he saw her fire in a doctor’s office in a cramped corner Wards, right the way through their hunt for Saren; Shepard’s finger on a trigger was the only excuse he needed.

He had gotten used to working in certainties back then, when his interactions with Shepard were quantifiable. Pass heat sink. Apply medigel. Find Cipher. Fight geth. They’d grown friendlier as the months passed, sure, but if she’d ever wavered he hadn’t been allowed to know about it. That changed sometime after he'd mostly forgotten the smell of burning hide. In an otherwise innocuous moment between firefights, she said something about a VI that made his stomach drop like he’d missed the step out of the main battery. At the time, he’d told her the only thing he could think to say.

 _You’re real. A little crazy, maybe –_  (she grinned which made him want to say it again) _– but real._

 _She’s only human_ , Joker said, when Garrus went to him about it the sleep-cycle after.

But surely – Garrus maintained – surely the problem was that she _wasn’t_ only human anymore. And if even Shepard didn’t know exactly where she ended and Cerberus began, how the hell was he supposed to?

Joker only shrugged, bafflingly unconcerned. _She still snorts when she laughs. Pretty sure the Illusive Man wouldn’t have burnt his credits programming that into a VI._

But she made different choices, too, and Garrus didn’t need a masterclass in human body language figure out they were all fuelled by rage. She took Maleon’s research, gunned down David Archer’s brother, and stepped out of Garrus’s scope – not out of compassion but to spite a universe that wasn’t fair.

Though she had given him Saleon, too, hadn’t she? Without Cerberus, before Lazarus, she had given him Saleon without even blinking. And even if her choices were different lately he couldn’t call them bad calls with any honesty – they just came from a different place. A place that saw death waiting and walked right on by.

What was different – really, truly, frighteningly different – was standing across from her in the muted blue light of her cabin, and watching her pulse climb the counter on his visor like they were about to drop in the Mako. It was feeling her palm slide quietly over the good half of his neck (who knew humans were so _warm)_ and drawing incrementally closer to her until he could count the – what had she called them? – _freckles_ on her nose.

And her skin – _Spirits,_ her skin _–_ like Tuchanka sand; all sloping peaks and troughs, deceptively soft and broken up by scars that faded to rubble on the edges. He’d seen the veins on her inner wrist enough times – tiny rivers of Asari blue – but he’d underestimated the sheer variety of colours humans wore before they even got dressed. She carried every imaginable shade of pink; deeper in places (around knees, elbows and knuckles) and barely-there in others. As she sat with her legs either side of him on the couch in her cabin, he noticed her toes must be cold because they were tinged with purple.

That, he reminded himself, wasn’t new information either. Sitting across the Mako from her on Noveria, in weather even climate control couldn’t fix, he’d asked why her mouth was turning blue in the corners.

 _Purple means cold, red means hot,_ she told him. He’d asked what blue meant, because it was obvious she wanted him to. _Blue means get me the fuck off this planet, Garrus._

With his forehead resting against hers, he breathed carefully. At least her toes weren’t blue.

‘You must be the only man in the galaxy who could give three gangs the finger, and still go weak at the knees when I take my pants off.’ And her eyes crinkled at the edges when she grinned.

‘You’re Commander Shepard even with your pants off,’ he said, trying to remember how his voice was supposed to sound.

He felt her brow rise. It was an expression he’d caught himself replicating lately.

‘Do I scare you?’ she asked.

In another context, a few weeks earlier, it might have been a difficult question.

‘Only as much as you scare everyone.’ That made her laugh so he kept talking, anything to keep that sound going like the sputter of her Vindicator. ‘Remember that kid in Zakera Ward? She wasn’t crying because she lost her dad, she just took one look at you.’

Quick as pulling a trigger, they might as well have been playing cards in the mess for all the difference it made.

‘Riiight,' she said, emphatically, 'because I’m sure it had nothing at all to do with you, pretty boy.’

Her thumb tracing the groove under his jaw and his hands resting on her thighs still mattered, but what mattered more was that she was still Shepard and he was still Garrus. Even if they didn’t really know how to take each other’s clothes off. Even if they were a little frayed around the edges. Even if they never came back through the relay.

 _This isn’t new,_ he told himself, while he counted her freckles in the half-light, _it only feels like it sometimes._

**Author's Note:**

> Using this as an excuse to dip a toe before getting my teeth into a long-fic, hope you enjoyed reading as much as I enjoyed writing.
> 
> Full list of this year's fictober prompts at http://barbex.tumblr.com/post/178393189908/a-list-of-prompts-for-october-write-something
> 
> Follow @fictober18 on tumblr for ALL THE FIC


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